How whom we marry affects income inequality
AEIdeas
A recent Economist issue highlighted the role of assortative marrying in the US inequality story. From its review of “Inequality: What Can Be Done” by Anthony Atkinson:
In America, for instance, incomes at the top of the scale began pulling away from the rest quite soon after 1945. Yet household inequality—taking account of taxes and transfers—did not rise until what Mr Atkinson calls the “Inequality Turn” around 1980. Several factors contributed to this, including changes for women and work. After the second world war, when female labour-force participation grew rapidly, high-earning men tended to marry low-earning women; the rising numbers of working women reduced household inequality. From the 1980s on, by contrast, men and women tended to marry those who earned like themselves—rich paired with rich; rising female participation in the workforce exacerbated inequality.
Bosses are now more likely to marry other executives rather than secretaries. The 2014 study “Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality” found that if marriage matching today were the same as in 1960, income inequality would be less. A 2006 New York Times article explored reasons behind the trend:
For one thing, more couples are meeting in college and other educational settings, where prospective mates come prescreened by admissions committees as discerning as any yenta. … Secondly, men and women have become more alike in what they want from a marriage partner. This convergence is both cultural — co-ed gyms and bars have replaced single-sex sewing circles and Elks clubs — and economic. Just as women have long sought to marry a good breadwinner, men, too, now find earning potential sexy. “There are fewer Cinderella marriages these days,” says Stephanie Coontz, author of “Marriage, a History.” “Men are less interested in rescuing a woman from poverty. They want to find someone who will pull her weight.” … And finally, there’s what Schwartz calls the growing “social and economic distance” between the well educated and the less so, a gulf even ardent romantics may find difficult to bridge.
Additionally, the late Gary Becker looked at how assortative mating affects the correlation between incomes and SAT scores:
The combination of assortative mating with higher returns to IQ could have dramatic effects on relative mobility if the effect was to insulate to a significant degree a prosperous family’s children from economic risk. And it may be. The adults in high-IQ families are disproportionately represented in the jobs (professional, managerial, financial, and so forth) that pay well, and their income can and often is used to give their children a boost—for example in the form of payment of tuition to high-quality (and very expensive) private schools, payment to tutors, a variety of other educational enrichments, and entry into high-quality colleges without need for their children to borrow to finance college (or graduate or professional school) and thus assume debt.
Colleges like to admit kids from high-income families, seeing such kids as future donors. And high-IQ parents are likely to produce high-IQ children, further enhancing the children’s attractiveness to first-rate colleges. These factors, which loom larger the greater the inequality in the income distribution, because that inequality creates a highly affluent tier of families (a proximed by the income shares of the top 10 percent and within that group the top 1 percent) are likely to reduce relative mobility, by securing a disproportionate number of the top college and university admissions and top jobs for children of the intellectual-economic elite.
I’m quite surprised that President Obama hasn’t proposed forcing marriages between different educational and social classes. Wouldn’t that be more effective than building low income housing in Beverley Hills? After all isn’t the goal to make everyone equally mediocre?
I think he left that one on the table for Bernie Sanders.
So basically, *feminism*, along with this troublesome business of letting women go to college and have careers, has created all this horrid prosperi … err… evil-and-deeply-unfair income inequality that basically threatens to destroy the planet and life as we know it? :p
Oh dear. How are they ever going to blame the GOP for this one?
Cassandra, feminism doesn’t “let women go to college and have careers.” The feminism of which you are talking is more than two hundred years old, and took place after the French revolution. Women have had the right to work and to get an education and even run for president for more than a hundred years, easily. To turn around and compare that with predetermining equality of outcomes in an age when women can get an education and in fact make up more of the institution than do men, hence all the of the academic nonesense like the author’s of this article, as well as a job, as well as a divorce, as well as vote, as well as run for president, as well as take part in law-making and so on and so forth, is just the kind of feminism people so profoundly detest. It is uninformed, disingenuous, and shows clearly that you are pandering to people who are too uneducated to think critically or verify what you claim or to those who already exhaust the same card you do. In short, you might think to consult at length the philosophy of science, it in no way supports the outlandish claims of postmodern feminism and this kind of article is yet more evidence of that. Instead of reporting knowledge or describing knowledge, the article of course accept that there is some inequality in the first place. Again, all one has to do is look at the statistics and they see plainly in nearly every case that women and men earn the very same amount when the variables are factored in. It’s only by not factoring in those variables that we get to “inequality,” and this is of course a necessary for most politicians and feminist agendas. Sad stuff.
Cassandra,
feminism doesn’t “let women go to college and have careers.” The feminism of which you are talking is more than two hundred years old, and took place after the French revolution. Women have had the right to work and to get an education and even run for president for more than a hundred years, easily. To turn around and compare that with predetermining equality of outcomes in an age when women can get an education and in fact make up more of the institution than do men, hence all the of the academic nonesense like the author’s of this article, as well as a job, as well as a divorce, as well as vote, as well as run for president, as well as take part in law-making and so on and so forth, is just the kind of feminism people so profoundly detest. It is uninformed, disingenuous, and shows clearly that you are pandering to people who are too uneducated to think critically or verify what you claim or to those who already exhaust the same card you do. In short, you might think to consult at length the philosophy of science, it in no way supports the outlandish claims of postmodern feminism and this kind of article is yet more evidence of that. Instead of reporting knowledge or describing knowledge, the article of course accepts that there is some inequality in the first place. Again, all one has to do is look at the statistics and they see plainly in nearly every case that women and men earn the very same amount when the variables are factored in. It’s only by not factoring in those variables that we get to “inequality,” and this is of course a necessary for most politicians and feminist agendas. Sad stuff.
The wealthiest 10% have a 75% share of wealth, the next 40% (the middle class) are down to 24% and the poorer half of the population (62 million families) are down to just a 1% share (a 70% loss since 1995). Young adults at the bottom can no longer afford to marry or make babies. They are kept just above the “income” poverty level with the earned income tax credit and the same earned income tax credit also keeps most in dead end jobs. Bad tax policy has destroyed marriage prospects for half the country.
The bottom 10% is not a static group. Smart and assertive poor people will go to college, meet other smart people and both will become at a minimum middle class if not higher. Their children will start in the middle class and if they also work hard their inherited intelligence will allow them to continue the cycle. For those whose intelligence is average a good work ethic may get them into college or become a small business owner and start the cycle from that perspective. People with poor work ethics or families headed by single head of house hold are more likely to stay in the bottom. They need to be told of the limits of a government dependent lifestyle.
One of the features driving the assortative mating that the Economist article describes is a change in the nature of marriage. Traditionally, marriages tended to be “production-based” where partners were chosen for their abilities to contribute to the partnership (e.g., farming, cooking). Now, not least because of increasing leisure time, marriages are more likely to be based on what people want to do together. These kinds of changes, together with the other trends identified in the article, make it impossible to attribute the increasing inequality in the US to simple causes like tax policy or global capitalism.